Man of Light
by Mockster
Summary: Lightman's tormenting of Loker... may have gone a bit too far.  Is Loker broken?  Or has he transcended his suffering and attained a higher level of consciousness?  Ch. 13:  Because leaving your daughter home alone with the MoL is a GOOD PLAN, KAL.
1. Light Hearted

Man of Light

pt. 1

How many times had Eli flirted with the hatred in his heart, turning it around his fingers with intent to grasp hold and pull it loose like the pin of a ragefilled grenade? How many times did he leave the building, urged out my the janitorial staff on strict orders from the boss, only to flop against an outer wall and, leaning forward, to wrap those same fingers around with handfuls of curled hair, pulling until his scalp was sore and he was bent double near the doors, ignoring the eyes of the janitors flashing behind the doors they were locking up, looking one to the other- but neither of them made the move to go against Lightman's orders. Neither of them dared.

Well, those days are over, now. Whether from cold or from hunger the fire inside had died down. When a guy stops counting calories to make sure he's not taking in too many and starts counting calories to make sure he takes in enough on any given day, those extremeties of emotiveness begin to shut down, and anger goes into the bin with the other luxuries he simply can't afford.

You would have thought that flame, one breath from going out, would sputter and wave and ultimately fail altogether. Lightman had certainly been looking for it, as much as Eli had taken it upon himself to cease his complaints to the establishment. He'd watched the changes in his unpaid intern at a distance, fully intending to reverse the process when he saw the young man at the end of his proverbial rope, thus, to all apperances, abandoned. It had been nothing less than a fascinating show, to watch the layers peel back from the man who had professed already to be so open. Lightman would show him the scouring it took to get down to the real, the vital truth. Or... he thought he would. Just as the weeks were shuffling past in which Lightman began to seriously consider pulling the brakes on this little project of his (a talking-to from Gillian had spurred such considerations), he was veering down the corridor at his usual breakneck speed when a sight struck him so funny that he strode backward no less than three times to pause there in the corridor, line of sight angling through a half-corridor and thence through the back wall of the lab, all window to the waist- there to linger a moment on the intern settled in his usual fishbowl. Something was wrong. And even Lightman's lightning wit took several long moments to figure out what it was. There was Eli, at some customary piece of business, a set of large high definition headphones swallowing up a large portion of either side of his head, his eyes flashing with the laptop's presentation of the readout on which they were intently focused, fingers moving over the keyboard as if they were possessed of their own spirit, with a quiet confidence and brisk efficiency. There was a subtle strength in the way his jaw was set and a singular focus in his entire being.

The man whom Lightman had watched for weeks plummeting precipitously into uselessness and helplessness had all of a sudden ceased to plummet. That fire that had been quenched with months of cold and hunger was no longer guttering, but had found a singular spot of safety at the young man's core, and was burning like a candle of vigil in the dark of the night, steady and serene.

Before Lightman could fathom the full meaning of this jarring halt in Eli's descent, the intern's head bore up under the burden of the heavy headset, and, with a slow, deliberate motion, turned until his eyes were fixed upon the eyes that he seemed to have been able to feel from all that distance away. They sat there, those eyes, steadily engaged with the eyes of the other. No hatred, no anger, but, on the other hand, no fear, no shrinking. Not a smile, not a frown, just a look, staring as if straight through the Doctor for the count of three before he bowed his head and turned it back to his work.

Lightman, released from the transfixing stare, gave a half an unsettled swallow. What in the name of hell had he done? 


	2. Light Minded

Man of Light

pt. 2

"Cal."

The downswerve of Gillian's monosyllable caused Lightman's shoulders to straighten and his feet to carry him along on the way he'd been headed before he'd been interrupted by the strange encounter. Gillian lingered behind for just long enough to follow Lightman's eyes' trajectory into the lab and onto the side of a dark, curly head of hair. Her lips tightened. She followed after him. "Cal, look at me," she tried to match his pace. "Did you talk to Loker, yet?"

"Top of my list, doll."

"I mean it. You can't just let him live like that."

"Like what?"

"Stop it, Cal. You know I went by his apartment last week. A Puerto Rican couple was moving in. Do you know where he's staying? Do you know if he's staying -anywhere?-"

Cal stopped, shifting his weight to one side and using the impetus to turn to face Gillian with a little more whip to his turn than she was exspecting, taking her by surprise and bringing her up close to him as she took a moment to stop, herself. "No," he told her, his face just daring her to keep asking questions.

"Well. -Find out,-" Gillian retorted, after a moment of fluster had had time to pass and she'd taken a half-step back to lessen the intensity of their proximity. "And get him back on your payroll before I do it for you. There's a case on our front step that could put us into the black for a long time if it goes well. There's a file waiting on your desk. Read it. Today."

"Bloody 'ell, when did you ever get so bossy?"

"When you stopped acting like the boss and started acting like the bully. Torres' flight got in late last night. I told her not to worry about getting here on time this morning. Try not to give her too hard of a time. Not that you ever give -her- a hard time," Gillian added. The blatant favoritism between his two employees had been another fun twist to Lightman's game.

Cal snorted derisively. "Loker's a big boy, Gillian. He can handle it." And, God, he hoped that that was true. Maybe what had happened earlier had all been in his imagination, anyhow. But still. Maybe Gillian was right. Maybe he'd taken this all a little too far. 


	3. Light Touch

Man of Light

pt. 3

It was like he'd never actually worked before. His mind was so clear, his thoughts uncluttered. He sat collating the data with a prime efficiency of which he could not take the time away from the task at hand to be proud. There was no metathought involved. He was simply -acting.- Not analyzing. Doing. Not doubting.

And then one of the ears of the headset was being pulled away from his ear and his back straightened.

"I said, 'Hi, Eli,'" Torres repeated, her face about four inches from his cheek before he turned his head, brows aloft for a brief moment in a clear microexpression of surprise the moment before she let go of the earpiece, letting it settle back into place over his nose and eyes, hiding anything else that might have been visible there for the time being.

"Guess you didn't miss me all that much," she teased him as he pulled the earphones off of his head and paused the program he was working on, crossing one leg over the other and setting the headset on his lap.

"Of course I did," he answered her, simple words, and true. "Welcome back. How was it?" his eyes drew slightly at the corners with a wince of sympathy along with the latter.

Was there something different about Loker today? Torres couldn't help but feel slightly touched by the unaffected, downplayed gesture of concern. No hug of sympathy or offers of emotional support more self-serving than not. Just a little twinge that let her know he cared, but wasn't going to oppress her with his desire to 'go and comfort her.' It was... refreshing.

"Uh..." she started, still sort of parsing all of this out. "I mean, it was tough. But he went peacefully, in the end. And the funeral was good. There were so many people there I thought had forgotten all about him a long time ago. I guess he touched more people than he knew."

Eli tipped his chin upward in a slip of a nod, eyes displaying a bright, clear sort of nostalgia at the elicited notion. "I guess that's... all we can really hope for, in the end, isn't it?"

And before she can say anything else, he's twisting his chair back to face the monitors. He's replacing the headset over his ears.

Torres watched him for a long few moments thereafter.

Something was definitely different about Loker. 


	4. Light Kitted

Man of Light

pt. 4

In his office, Lightman was half-heartedly thumbing through the case file Gillian had put together for him. Reading it, yes, but his mind- his mind was somewhere else.

"What's up with Loker?"

Yep, that's the place. He lifted his eyes from the paper to his protege. "I've no notion."

A moment of eye contact and Ria was stepping closer to the far edge of her boss' desk. "What did you do?"

It was enough to set Cal's teeth on edge. Real anger on his face - though anger aimed, perhaps, more at himself than at Torres - he leaned forward and twisted his gaze upward like a knife into Torres' eyes. "I don't care to be spoken to like that this early in the morning."

The warning was clear enough, and though the anger was enough to spark up Torres' own temper, she let it settle on her face rather than giving it any voice, knowing well enough that he could see it there. In silence, she crossed her arms.

When it was clear that Torres wasn't going to go over the line drawn there in the sand, "We have a case," he flopped the folder shut and threw it onto the desk in front of him to punctuate the statement before leaning back once more. "Ambassador K. Druten is come 'round to us on the sly. Seems his son got into some sort of trouble whilst chasing after a charming collection of vices. Doesn't want the FBI poking its nose into his family's business. Kid's gone missing. His other private hires aren't coming up jack."

"He sent us any contacts for starters?" Ria finally spoke up.

"He's done better than that." Lightman fished a flash drive out of the folder and held it up between two fingers. "He sent us video footage."

"And you want me to go over it?"

Lightman paused for a moment, then, in a flurry of fingers, made the flash drive disappear. "No."

"So what do you want me to do?"

"I've got another case for you to look after." 


	5. Red Light

Author's note: If anyone out there is still reading this nonsense after those last few rather boring chapters -

- First of all, thank you.

- Second of all, I will try to make something interesting happen soon.

- Third of all, maybe it will even make sense, eventually. I'm just going where my muse prods me. I have a couple of different ideas of what's going on/how things will end up, and every time I sit down to write a chapter it gets just a little bit more clear. I don't -think- Torres is going to get offed. And if she is, I don't -think- it's going to be by the Man of Light. But. Don't hold me to that.

Man of Light

pt. 5

Ria shifted the styrofoam cup into her other hand and bent the wrist of her hand thus freed-from-cupholder-duty to let the face of her watch peek out from between her jacket sleeve and the cuff of her glove. Eight twenty eight. Long past when she had 'officially' left the office. She'd gotten changed into some warmer gear and picked up some coffee before taking up her post. She had a feeling that it would be a long night.

She had no freaking idea.

And there's the boy; he's on the move straight out of the stately, professional glass doors of the Lightman Group offices, the light in the foyer warm around his person, rolling over squared shoulders and a face turned in dark sillhouette against the gold. She couldn't hear the doors shut, from the distance from which she was observing, but she knew the noise by heart. Some thirty seconds later the doorkeepers snuck to the threshold to lock up, but by then Eli had stepped away from the light, hands buried deep in pockets, and Ria could have sworn she could see his lips moving for a split second before the warm light glistened off of the last crescent of his form and he melted into the darkness angled between the buildings and the sidewalk.

Ria set her coffee into her car's cupholder and turned on her turn signal, orange reflecting off of the car in front of her and lighting up the side of her face, on and off, on and off, on and off before she could pull into traffic. She stopped at a red light at the next block and soon she saw the fire-red of the light glisten against a sole moving figure beyond the parked cars to her left. Ahead of him, across the intersection, a large sign was telling him not to walk. From her vantage point, Ria could see him sort of cock his head briskly to one side, eyebrows contracting into a mild furrow as he held eye contact with the red-light man, exxed out on the placard across the way. 'Don't walk? Why not?' his expression seemed to read, and then, as if the thing had actually answered him, he slowly rightened the alignment of his neck, and, lifting his chin, gave a slow, half-wary nod to the sign across the street, and, obeying whatever god was living in the traffic signal, he turned to his left and kept walking along the same block.

O... kay. Torres turned on the turn signal again, and waited for a chance to get over into the turn lane. 


	6. Light Snack

Sorry for the slow. Work is being work. But here's more weirdness! I'm still waffling between 'psychic' and 'psychotic.' I can see the story going either way, but I'm going to really need to commit to one or the other, soon. Or I could just commit the Man of Light. ;)

Man of Light

pt. 6

Torres didn't think it could get much stranger from there. Yet, though she kept careful note, the significance of the next series of events, if there was any, completely eluded her comprehension.

Down the cross-street to a fork in the road, on the acute angle of the mangled blockface of which a broad pole raised aloft the golden arches of a shoddy-looking McDonalds. She took the left fork of the road and turned through traffic into the parking lot, where she hoped to have a good vantage point of which direction Eli would take from there. Finally she spotted him hunching along the far sidewalk, following the path she'd driven. And then stopping. And, looking one way, and then the other, face now lit white with headlights, now red with brakelights, he waited for traffic to crawl to a halt once more, and he crossed the street into the parking lot, himself.

"Shit. Shit," she started, to herself. He'd seen her. He must have. She straightened around in her seat and cleared her throat, shifting minutely as her brain raced to come up with some probable excuse she could pass off on the guy for why she'd been following him. After she'd drawn a few deep breaths and a total blank, she glanced into the side view mirror to see how much time she had left on his approach. He wasn't there. She looked into her rear view mirror, instead, and found him with her line of sight, there, by the back of the building, in conversation with a man in a black coat, with a shaved-bald head just bristled with some dark fuzz of hair. The latter landed off to the former some manner of package, a rectangular affair that looked to have had a paper bag wrapped messily but tightly around it. As Eli took the package with a word or two accompanied by nothing but a stoic, almost peaceful expression on his face, he turned and stepped up onto the walk, heading inside. The other, as if aware of being watched, turned his head directly toward the back window of Ria's car, looking as though straight into her rear-view mirror, sending her own gaze skittering away with a brief narrowing of his eyes and furrow of his brow. When she looked up again, and then, for good measure, out one window, then out the other, he was gone.

She pulled out her notepad and made a hasty reckoning of the evening's events up to that point before she put the car into reverse and pulled out of her parking spot, drawing, instead, into the drive-through, putting in an order for a small coffee. Seventy two cents. Seventy two cents? She opened up the change holder below the steering wheel and tumbed out three quarters, and pulled around. When the tall, lithe brown-skinned woman in the funny visor opened up the window to her and held her hand out, Ria thought she saw a flicker of surprise on the teller's face when the three silvery coins clatted into her hand. An expression gone, as these things so often do, almost before it was thoroughly conceived.

"What?" Ria, of course, had to play chase-the-microexpression.

"Nothing," the woman answered, voice light and musical. "It's just." A pause as a breath gathered up behind a glottal expression: "Huh. Nothing," she shook her head, and reached back out with three pennies, returning the small coppery coins for the larger silverish ones. The small coffee followed a moment later, and the window was closed to further questioning.

Ria set the coffee in the second cupholder at the front of her car. She didn't even like the coffee from here. Her seventy two cents had been donated in the cause of tracking down her co-worker and one-time lover, Eli Loker. And so, lips tightened into a line, she pulled ahead in the lane, going to make a slow circuit of the window-heavy building.

It was after turning the first corner that she was rewarded for her efforts. She easily recognized the coat slung over the back of a booth up by the window. She slowed even further, drifting at somewhere just under five miles an hour and peering into the brightly lit building from the darkness outside, trusting in the light differential to let her see him without his seeing her, himself, even at the relatively close distance.

"What the... hell?" she whispered to herself, head turning at pace with her slothful drive-by. The contents of the paper bag were out on the table. A plastic box filled with playing cards. Probably at least fifteen decks worth. And if Torres knew what sort of complicated solitaire-esque game was sprawling across the table, there, inside the mostly-empty eatery, she couldn't recognize it. Large cross patterns were growing more intricate by the moment as Eli pulled and pulled from the massive deck, eyes seeming barely focused on the task at hand, and yet fully attentive. Ria's own eyes moved from Loker's to the tabletop, her brow furrowing as she tried to make some sense of what it was he was trying to-

Her heart nearly stopped in her chest. There, on the far edge of the table, next to the window, as if placed there for her to see, was a small cup of McDonald's coffee, and, to its left, in a straight line, evenly spaced, three shiny new pennies were glinting in the harsh fluorescent light. Eli's brows perked upward in the middle, and a smile Ria could almost describe as smug settled amongst his features as he turned his head to look out the window.

Whipping her head back around, she put her foot on the gas pedal and swerved to miss a car backing out of a parking spot on her way out of the lot. 


	7. Tail Lights

MegalegU: You are so sweet. Thank you for the encouragement. This chapter is for you. :) Well, actually, the next chapter is for you, but this chapter sort of demanded to be written before my muse would let me write the other one. Anyhow, thanks. :)

Man of Light

pt. 7

Ria's heart was racing when she pulled out onto the road, moving from lane to lane to get around slower traffic and only bome miracle of fate managing not to get a ticket as she found her way onto less crowded streets and was pushing thirty over the speed limit on her way.

Twenty.

Ten.

By the time she was hovering between her usual five to eight over the speed limit, some time had lapsed between herself and her momentary freakout that she was beginning to doubt her own reactions. Here she was trying to figure out whether or not Eli Loker had cracked, and now she's halway out of town wondering whether she was starting to lose it, herself. Panicking over a cup of coffee and a few coppery coins. What would she tell Lightman? What COULD she tell Lightman? He'd read the whole story right off of her, of course. And then what? A chill settled over her that the rush of hot air ouring from her car's AC unit couldn't shake. She knew well enough how Lightman could act to a person once he'd made up his mind about him. What if Lightman would be looking for a new whipping boy now that Eli's...

Eli's what, exactly?

That's what she was meant to be finding out. She finally found a broad, deserted intersection and pulled a u-turn, her fear veering through frustration and peaking at anger for a moment. Lightman. What gives him the right to treat people like that, anyhow? Ria was going to find Eli, and not only that- she was going to talk to him. Let him know he wasn't alone. What she'd seen that day at work, that- simple, open sweetness, the artless care in his eyes. How could Lightman tread on something like that? A pang of guilt, there. How often had she smiled along with Lightman's little jabs? Played along, teased him even as she saw how much he wanted her? Told her outright, even? He'd always been honest with her, and she'd woven so many yesses and nos around him- and enoyed it.

And that morning in the lab- that was it, wasn't it? That was what had struck her the hardest. There was no chase in his eyes, no hope. Fondness, yes. Friendship, sure. But that distracted sort of arousal that it had been her idle hobby to toy with in the past? Not a trace. Was that what it took to finally catch her attention? To stop getting chased after, and being made to chase, instead? There was definitely a sort of rankle in her innards at the switch-up. But what did that little twinge -mean-? She didn't know. Or, if she did know, she didn't want to think about it, just then. All she knew was that she wanted to get back to him.

The niggling wonder about whether she meant physically or emotionally was cut short when she ran into a brick wall of frustration and taillights. She lifted her hands and smacked them hard on both sides of the steering wheel. 


	8. Lights Out

Man of Light

pt. 8

The hours ticked by, and by the time Torres had gotten past the accident that was tying up the road, it was nearly midnight. There was no way that Eli was still sitting where she'd left him. But still, it was her last lead. She sped on past the last few miles of road, her engine rattling on the last of the fumes left in her tank after the hours of sitting in traffic, drifting into the gas station behind the McDonald's and pulling up to a pump, yanking the parking brake into place and shoving open the door with her shoulder, hooking a buckle of her boot on the lip of the car door in her hurry to get out, tripping and landing with her palms on the harsh pavement, scraping them up and then drawing herself along with a hiss of air throug her teeth- a hiss stifled as she shoved herself back behind the pump, peering from low between the pump and the window wipe station. Holy crap.

It was Eli. Had he been playing cards in there for all this time? Did he have anywhere else to go? He certainly moved like a man on a mission, now, bundled in his coat with his scarf done up around his cheeks, hands in his pockets and leaning into the wind, cutting through the parking lot and off down the street at a sharp clip that was nearly a jog without looking half so rushed as one.

He'd stopped chasing her. He'd stopped chasing her. So what could she do? Maybe the only thing he'd wanted her to do all along. She started to chase him.

She pushed up from the ground, absent-minded, tunnel-visioned. The door to her car open, the key in the ignition. She ran. He ran. He ran diagonally across a busy thoroughfare, the crossing timed as if by higher powers, traffic rushing past him without his faltering in his stride or they swerving from their course. She, on coming to the same ford in the river of traffic, raised up her arms, sending up a firestorm of honking as she wavered, bloody-palmed, into the street, flinching from this direction and from that, breath hitching and heart faltering until she found the other side of the road and her pace once more, crossing a grassy expanse and across a bike path, jumping onto a cast-iron fence like it was a liferaft on a sinking ship, palms burning as she grabbed the pikes and pulled herself over, dropping down into the well-tended mulch, hitting a thick, low magnolia branch or two on the way down. It was a park. She didn't know which one. She only knew that she could vaguely sense some motion back through the trees. Some motion, and then- nothing. Silence. She felt dizzy, disoriented. She shoved through the pain and the wheeling in her head; she shoved through the trees, following along where some notion of a presence was calling her.

"Eli?" she called back. "ELI?" She was done with sneaking around. She wanted him to know that she was here. "Eli, where are you?" she pushed out onto the open grasses, where the park laid out in front of her in the moonlight, grass shining silver without a hint of a footprint in the half-frozen greenery.

A snap of some twig buried beneath a clod of dried mulch sounded like a gunshot in the night. And then the world went dark, and the whole world was reduced to the cold fabric blanketing her face, the tight pull of a cord around her throat, and the sharp stab of a needle into her neck. 


	9. Night Light

Man of Light

pt. 9

Twelve fifty three in the morning, and sleep had so far completely eluded Cal Lightman. One leg propped up on the ottoman, a drink in his opposite hand as his bent knee swayed a centimeter or two to and fro and he stared down the clock with the unsettled feeling in his stomach that something was horribly awry. Finally yielding to the rising urge to make his rounds, he straightened his elbow, glass landing on a coaster placed just so for its reception. He kicked his raised heel down and shoved on up to his feet, strolling on past the threshold of the living room and taking up the electronic thermometer from the counter, cupping the body of it in his hand as he walked past the wide windows, looking out into the dark, and then repairing down a dimly-lit corridor.

He placed the knuckles of his free hand against the cracked door to Emily's room, the nightlight down in one corner casting long, faint shades upwards toward the ceiling. The green light of her alarm clock made her sweat-sheened skin glint a pallid grey-green. Her mouth was slightly open, and her breath rattled in her chest with the force of her fever. A deeper breath roused her with a hacking cough and she turned over onto her side before her eyes were quite open.

"Shh," Cal whispered, perching on the edge of the bed and running his night-cooled fingers across her fever-red cheeks, pushing back her hair out of her face and over her ear. "It'll break soon," he went on, then, lifting his other hand, he slid the thermometer into her ear and clicked the button. A moment or seven later the thing was beeping, and he turned the contraption around to eye the readout. One hundred point four. Down from earlier. "There. There we go," he murmured to her. Her lips were moving. "I'll bring you some more water," he told her, and she, satisfied, lay still.

His fears somewhat allayed, he rose from the bed and drifted back down the corridor to the kitchen, where the thermometer was washed in hot running water and a glass was filled with cool running water and brought back to Emily's room, where she was too asleep to drink of it.

He left it on her nightstand, no different, in case she needed it later, and retired once more, his own efforts to make certain that the world was in some semblance of good order having... not entirely convinced him. He went and picked up his cell phone from where it had been tossed face-down on the coffeetable. Nothing from Torres. Not that he was worried, or anything.

(He found that the best first step in lying to others was to be found in first lying to oneself.)

He heard a new round of coughing from the corridor, and in a second he was up and on his feet again. At least some things in this world could be within the realm of his control. 


	10. First Light

Man of Light

pt. 10

It wasn't dawn yet - the deep December frost was keeping the rosy-fingered Goddess in Tithonus' bed some hours longer - but with Emily's fever having broken somewhere between three and four in the morning, and with six o'clock well on its way to its minutes' dance on the clockface, Lightman, eyes still untouched by sleep, tossed off an e-mail to his daughter's school to let them know that she wouldn't be in that day, and, having peeked in on the still-sleeping love of his heart, he left her a note and stepped out for a walk. She'd been asleep since two, and, if he knew a thing or two about childhood illnesses, she would be out for the better portion of the morning hours.

The horizon was greying by the time he got out of the house and was headed down the way, bundled against the chill in a sweater and a coat. And yet, somehow, the chill fought back, and the layers of warm air from the inside of the house were invaded by the sharp drafts, and the comfort zone of his paternal domesticity was speared from this angle and that by concerns over his errant staff. He pulled his phone from his jacket pocket. Nothing from Torres. Nothing from Loker- of course, he hadn't really EXPECTED anything from Loker. He looked again. Still nothing from Torres. His lips twitched to one side, and he took a deep breath, putting his phone away and endeavoring to forget that it was there in his pocket to be checked. The sun, after all, was just peering over the horizon, its beams making the velvety frost on each blade of grass sparkle and shine along the crests of the short hillocks stretching across the park. The paths were clear, and somewhere in the distance two dog-walkers' canine companions were having a row, a cold, clear barking ringing out across the nearly bucolic landscape.

He was summoning up some long-buried line of Vergil when he spotted something down the way that at once made his stomach twist and at the very least was kind enough to take his mind off of his phone entirely.

It was a body. The frost carried off a number of the city's homeless every year, and the statistics running through Lightman's head roused the very wrath in him. He ramped his aimless amble up to a purposeful walk, and he was reaching into his pocket and drawing out his phone once more, this time to call the proper authorities, his sneakers crunching through the frosted grass when he stopped dead in his tracks.

That body.

He knew that body.

His phone fell from his hand, and was left behind in the grass as Lightman all but sprinted ahead. 


	11. Light Conscience

Sorry to leave you on a cliffhanger, SALONEE. I had to write this chapter twice before it came out kind of how I wanted it to. Anyhow, here you go. :)

Man of Light

pt. 11

"Loker. /Loker/."

Most people, when they shut their eyes, find themselves held suspended in a blackness interrupted only by the boundaries of infinity and occasional strains of hallucinatory imagery that are wont to pass by in the night. But some, some very few, whose numbers the world does not yet know for certain, live in the light of the universe within themselves, white, pristine and pure. And the hardest thing to do is to open ones eyes and adjust them once more to the dark.

But Eli's eyes did open- slowly, at first, then snapping open, the darkness taking him by surprise as his own hand snapped upward to grasp the wrist of the man with his hand at his throat, baser instincts kicking in to preserve him from a perceived attempt on his life.

And as for Lightman- the first thing that could register in his conscious mind was the flood of relief that followed upon his realization that the young man he'd abused so shamelessly was not, in fact, deceased as a direct result of that cruelty. The second thing that registered with his conscious mind was that his wrist was being bent in a direction it should decidedly not be bent in. He was just getting used to -that- realization when suddenly he was on his back, his unpaid intern on top of him with a feral sort of countenance, looking as though about to pummel the snot out of his boss.

He couldn't do much but to lift his free hand in a reflexive gesture of self-defence before Eli's eyes seemed somehow to focus on the present, and, breathing deep and quick, he took a few moments to come fully to his senses. "... Lightman?" he asks, as if suspicious that the man might not be who he appeared to be.

"It's me, it's me, okay," Lightman tried to keep his voice evenly moderated over the daggers of pain shoting up his arm from his wrist, hesitantly lowering his other arm to let the obviously confused Loker see his face clearly.

"C'n I 'ave my arm back, then?" he went on, seeing the recognition in the young man's features. Eli obligingly released the requested limb and even went so far as to slide to the side and pull himself into an indian-style sitting position on the ground next to Lightman, who used the opportunity to pull his arm to his chest and to sit up a little bit, himself- not to mention to take a once-over of the man he'd caught sleeping in the park.

"How long've you been out here, Loker," he went on to ask, finding the sleep-headed young man brushing his mud-crusted hands wanly against his trousers as he slowly but precisely went through the motions of getting to his feet. Looking down into the eyes of his boss, still on the ground, he held down a hand to help him up. "Not, uh..." he looked off to the side, squinting toward the horizon for a moment, "Not too long," he answered.

And although everything in Lightman's being told him that that was the sort of rubbish reply he'd expected- Loker seemed to be speaking the truth. The momentary calculation based on a remembrance of when he got here and an attempt to assess what time it was at present by the progress of the sunrise. Lightman didn't want to believe him. But he did. Eli Loker hadn't had much practice in lying, prior to coming to the Lightman Group. And even though he seemed of recent years to have been practicing the skill, even when assisted by pharmaceuticals Lightman knew he was crap at it. Now the markers were all in alignment, and his internal lie detector was coming up green. No matter how much Lightman had pre-determined it to be a lie. The incongruity staggered him even more than the throbbing ache in his wrist, such that it took him a few more moments to reach up with his uninjured hand and accept the help to his feet.

"Where are you staying?" he went on to ask, head cocked to the side and narrowing his scrutiny onto the young man's face in that manner he had that screamed, 'don't even try to lie to me, Eli.'

"Between places, right now," Eli answered. That much Lightman believed wholeheartedly, and he reflexively swallowed ovewr a piece of mixed emotion. Sadness. Guilt. Shame. He should never have let it get this far. Whether Eli picked up on this or was simply curious, he went on, "Since when do you care, anyhow?" And somehow - though Lightman has still yet to figure out how - it sounded of pure curiosity, unmixed with any tinge of bitterness. The purity with which the young man asked it of him only drove the guilt home all the harder for the very fact that it wasn't meant to.

"Since now," Lightman answered succinctly, something almost paternal coming over his demanor. "You're coming home with me," he let his intern know.

Eli's eyebrows knit together in a frank expression of mixed surprise and wariness, but, "Um. Alright," he answered. "Inside is better than outside," he reasoned. "It's cold out." As if Lightman might not have noticed.

"You'll stay home today and have a wash and a rest," Cal was going on, glancing back toward the ground where Eli had been laid out somewhat previously. There was some sort of disturbance in the soil, and, on looking at his intern's hands, he realized that at some point Eli had actually been trying to dig through the dirt. He didn't comment on it, though. His guilt had won him over and steered him from suspicion to compassion, blinding him to signs he should never have ignored before taking the Man of Light into his home. 


	12. A Light Breakfast

Yes, I like slash. No, this story will not turn slashward. I don't think. Sorry if my slashtastic tendencies are showing their colors here a little bit, for those of you who don't like that sort of thing. And for those of you who do like that sort of thing, feel free to read what you will into the subtext. Or try to bribe my muse with cloying comments to carry on in this vein. ;)

Man of Light

pt. 12

The morning's light had sent its squared-off beams several feet across the living room floor in the Lightman household when his cell phone began to ring.

Lightman lifted his chin and looked aside at the device, trying to read the display from halfway across the kitchen. No joy. And he wasn't about to leave the stove to answer it. He had it down to a science, after all. Second on the list after reading faces- his perfectly timed chocolate chip pancakes. Emily's favorite. Emily's- Emily's.

Emily was still asleep. Why was he making chocolate chip pancakes, over and above the fried eggs, english muffins and curled slices of sizzling hot bacon? No idea. He chalked it up to a long night and poured another pancake.

He barely recognized his intern when he got out of the shower and slid down the corridor in a pair of Cal's slippers and a robe he seemed to nearly disappear into. Curly hair heavy with water hung in longer ringlets than was its custom when dry. He'd shaved in the shower and at least a couple of years had come off with the rough stubble. Flush with the warm shower, he was rosy-cheeked and sleepy-eyed as he came into the kitchen.

"Chocolate chips?" Not exactly incredulous, but getting there.

"Em's favorite."

Eli looked behind him, back toward Emily's room. "She's asleep," he pointed out.

"They're for you."

It might have been his imagination, but as Eli's eyes scanned the ingredients on the countertop one more time, it seemed to Lightman that he might just have been checking to make sure there wasn't any arsenic among the bottles of vanilla extract and lime juice.

Seeing none, "Thanks," he answered, somewhat tentatively, and settled up onto a stool on the other side of the kitchen island. "Is your arm-?" he introduced the question, though finished it up with just a nod at the offended limb.

"It's fine, yeah, thanks. You know your way around a bandage," Lightman pointed out, flipping a pancake while giving the younger man a nod of tacit approval in regards to the way his fingers were precariously poised over a piece of bacon. Eli swiped the breakfast meat and crunched down on it.

"Guess so. Sorry about, uh- all of that," he told Lightman, mouth full, though he lifted his other hand to hold it a few inches in front of his mouth in an effort not to spit on anything.

"Nothing I don't guess I didn't deserve," Cal replied with a surprising dose of candor, one large enough to distract Eli from the I'm Hungry noises his stomach was sending his brain.

"Oh?" is all he said, unsure of how exactly to take that.

Cal slid another pancake onto the pile, turned off the stovetop and turned around with the plate of chocolate chip pancakes, sliding them onto the island.

"And more," he went on, by way of affirmation. "I know it's nothing that a batch of chocolate chip pancakes can fix, Loker. But. You should know that you've got a place here, as long as you need it, ey?"

Huddled inside the robe, Eli looked into Lightman's eyes, seeming to take stock of his boss' intentions, a gaze as incisive as it was peaceful.

A silence hung between them, an uncertainty as to this strange new pact into which they were entering, one moment, two, before Eli's fingers inched forward across the island, stealing a chocolate chip pancake and folding it in two to eat.

"Okay." 


	13. LightStaffed

Short chapter is short. Moving the story along. I have not forgotten that Ria's gone missing/been injured/killed (and neither should you, all of you who, like me, might otherwise find Lightman's taking the Man of Light into his home absolutely adorable). And once we see a little more about this case Lightman's supposed to be working on, that will tie into the story as well. But I'm leaving tomorrow for Christmastime with the family, so updates may be delayed until next week. Happy holidays to those of you as celebrate.

Man of Light

pt. 13

Less than an hour later the phone rang again. Breakfast had passed without incident, and Lightman, on noticing how drawn and exhausted Eli was looking, put him to bed on a full stomach, letting the food coma take over him. He was cleaning up the kitchen and he swiped the phone up off of the counter without so much as checking who was calling.

"Lightman."

"Kal, where are you?"

Gillian. "At home. Em's sick," he explained in a manner both terse and deliberately lacunose. The hell he's going to catch when she finds out about Loker...

... is evidently nothing in comparison with the hell he was going to catch right now. He could hear it, there, in the pause just before her speech. That was her I'm-not-going-to-yell-so-I'd-better-think-of-something-to-say pause, sizzling with subdued, unspoken wrath.

"Thanks for letting me know. Torres isn't here. Loker isn't here. YOU'RE not here. The only people -here-? Kal?" she twisted the word inflections upward into a rhetorical question, of sorts, "Are me and a group of clients who have been waiting for a meeting with you for the last hour. And none of us are particularly happy, right now."

Lightman was walking down the corridor on little cat feet whilst receiving this rebuke, mouthing 'oh, fuck me,' in an only half-voiced whisper, looking into Emily's room, first, where she was looking peaceful in her repose at last, then, further on down the hall, he looked into his own room, where Loker was bundled up in bed while his stomach worked on a breakfast rather larger than he was used to, drawing the blood away from his brain and putting him all kinds of out.

All quiet on the Lightman Home front. "Alright. Alright, Gill, she's asleep, now. I'll be over in a few minutes, just- go and get them some coffee or something."

And he slipped the phone shut before she had time to yell at him any further. He changed his clothes and was grabbing up his keys and heading out the front door before he paused. Wait. Had Gillian said that Torres hadn't come into work this morning, either? Key half-in the lock, he stood in silence a moment, the question echoing in his mind. Then, shoving the key to, he locked up the house with its slumbering contents and was off. He'd figure it out when he got into work. 


End file.
